To be perfectly honest I was hoping to play the Beta and not be too thrilled with the game, so I could shrug it off and give it a miss.. but I had a really good time.

The game looks pretty, really pretty. The character models are meticulously detailed and the environments are vibrant, colourful and full of style. Make sure you upgrade your graphics card drivers, using old ones I could only play on Low without it stuttering but afterwards I was rocking out with my cock out on High. Another thing of note is changing the graphics settings is done on the fly and is quite noticeable, but even on low the game was full of very pretty blurs and still playable.

I found the characters in the Dominion intro part interesting and broke some moulds, like Artemis Zin sneaking through the teleporter while the army dude was getting his troops ready to secure it first. It would be very easy to miss things like this if you're not paying attention, much like a lot of humour and easter eggs throughout the world that you'll skim over if you're in a mad dash to complete the quest and level up. The quirky humour seems pretty persistent which is great, I loved the "holy s*** cupcake, you levelled up" voiceover which made me crack up.

The combat was a lot of fun, and while lag was a bit noticeable you just adjusted your play style. I really like the telegraph effects, they look good and fit in with the style well. Boss fights are a big highlight as they have a lot of abilities you need to dodge in/out of while still getting damage through. I can see that raids could be something quite special down the track.

Questing wise, this felt a bit strange at first. The mini map is a bit cluttered and hard to read, but clicking on the quest points you in the direction of where you need to go which helps a lot. The interaction between your character and quest givers seems a bit bland, as it's mostly just text and I found myself skipping a lot of it. On your questing journey there's a lot of pop up events and races and things which makes it feel quite organic as there's more loot flying everywhere. The Vacuum loot and remote quest hand in features are both awesome. Near the end of my playtime it was beginning to feel a bit MMO-samey. I was in a town that was a quest hub, I was dying and ressing every now and then and having to run back out to complete quests and all that, but in the actual game I should be playing with Twelvians by then which will make it a lot more fun.

I ran into trouble not being able to go back after choosing to create a character and wanting to change race, but I was blind drunk at that point so may have missed something obvious.. like the customise button the first few times haha. Apart from that there was just the odd bush that had a bounding box too big for it that I should have been able to jump over, and some minor things like seeing the character teleport to a new area before the fade-to-black finishes that they could fix pretty easily.

Overall I was quite impressed, it was a lot more polished and fun to play than I expected.

End of Beta Event is still on-going. Started out with a small robot, then a huge monster. Followed by even larger robots and even weirder looking monsters (the red hand-standing one was particularly amusing). One of the devs, CRB Ryzhara, stood around emote-taunting us the whole time.

Also, a message popup in /realm with a cheat on how to get to insta-lvl 50 [/eval GameLib.Cheat_MakeMeLevel50()], would pop you back to Windows and Rick/Roll you instead.

Just as it was about to die, BAM, discon.

Aaannnnddd more robots.

WoW is Life, and Death is the Only True PeaceThe Obliterator of Worlds and Ravager of Youths DOES NOT EAT INDIAN!

I only played abit of it. Tried out all the classes, I Had fun with all the classes, But i think my favorite is the Stalker. I tried all the different paths, Which i though were pretty good. I Was pretty bummed out, i missed the first half of the open beta... But defiantly pre-ordering this. I'll be rolling a Stalker-Soldier path. Tossing up between Mechari or a Draken.

I only played abit of it. Tried out all the classes, I Had fun with all the classes, But i think my favorite is the Stalker. I tried all the different paths, Which i though were pretty good. I Was pretty bummed out, i missed the first half of the open beta... But defiantly pre-ordering this. I'll be rolling a Stalker-Soldier path. Tossing up between Mechari or a Draken.

Awesome jlab, good to see another familiar face from the barthilas wow crew signing up!

I played a bit of open beta on the weekend - Draken spellslinger, got to about level 5.

I quite liked what I saw. I really like the visuals. It's nice not to be set in a medieval style world - I liked the SWTOR on LSD colours and settings. Remote quest hand-ins are great. We did the Scientist path - seems cool, though we didn't get very far into it and I'm not sure exactly what benefits it has yet.

I'd say we will end up buying the game, though the release date is the day after Spawn is due, so not sure how much time we will have to play in the first weeks of release.

And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."

I played a bit of open beta on the weekend - Draken spellslinger, got to about level 5.

I quite liked what I saw. I really like the visuals. It's nice not to be set in a medieval style world - I liked the SWTOR on LSD colours and settings. Remote quest hand-ins are great. We did the Scientist path - seems cool, though we didn't get very far into it and I'm not sure exactly what benefits it has yet.

I'd say we will end up buying the game, though the release date is the day after Spawn is due, so not sure how much time we will have to play in the first weeks of release.

I played a bit of open beta on the weekend - Draken spellslinger, got to about level 5.

I quite liked what I saw. I really like the visuals. It's nice not to be set in a medieval style world - I liked the SWTOR on LSD colours and settings. Remote quest hand-ins are great. We did the Scientist path - seems cool, though we didn't get very far into it and I'm not sure exactly what benefits it has yet.

I'd say we will end up buying the game, though the release date is the day after Spawn is due, so not sure how much time we will have to play in the first weeks of release.

Loot, when the loot drops it doesn't stand out enough for you to pick it up or use vacuum ( V ), I had that annoying issue of just walking away from a corpse and forgetting to loot because it appeared nothing was there to pick up, they really need a way for it to stand out more.

One thing that is neat is you can actually climb up insanely steep cliffs, unlike wow where you would have to glitchy wall jumps or cliffs that looked like you could climb but can't, in Wildstar you can definitely climb a majority of them no problem. When I first seen it my impression was "O shit, is this a bug or actually apart of the game?", might seem no big of a deal to some players, but me personally it makes pathing a whole lot better.

Camera range is absolutely great, this is one thing that WoW failed at as it was so limited and you couldn't see random aggro's from outside of your bird eye view screen, also talking about aggro, it's a nice feature that mobs have eyes of two colours that appear above their heads, blue and red I think it was as blue you are close to aggroing the mob while red is "they saw you prepare yourself!!".

Binds are a bit confusing, but that is the normal as it's a new MMORPG so that will take getting used to.

Dash (activated by double taping the direction you want to go) is a very nice addition, helps with dodging those skills and the double jump was something interesting (Metroid anyone) that caught me of guard.

So much potential, but the real issue is "how long till it becomes stale?". The only reason why WoW has lasted as long as it has as an MMO was:

Because it could be run on poor computer specsConstant evolving contentNerfs and buffs on classes and specsMerchandise a long with it.

Lots of MMORPG's have fallen to the great tyrant of WoW, hopefully Wildstar doesn't become another casualty to WoW.

And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."